If one was looking for things to be unhappy with the advocacy establishment for, we can look to the recent Dont Ask, Dont Tell show for plenty of ammunition. The manner in which the gay advocacy organizations are attacking this issue is ineffective and wrong from a moral standpoint, an intellectual standpoint as well as a logistical one. No one seems to be calling for any major changes, however. This shouldn’t be entirely surprising, considering that the same the Gay, Inc. coalition of mega advocacy outlets gets it wrong early and often.
The Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA) affects millions of people in states like this one, where it can be impossible for a queer person to get and hold a job due to the bias against them. ENDA would make firing a queer illegal and make it illegal to refuse to hire them, too. Just like you can’t refuse to hire and can’t fire people because of their sex or race.
We’re going after Dont Ask, Dont Tell (DADT) first because its patriotic and no one wants to appear remotely non-supportive of our veterans and no other reason. That’s poor advocacy. The mission should always be to help the most people simultaneously, when its not possible to deliver service to everyone at the same time. Just like in a hospital emergency room. A guy with a heart attack gets seen before the lady with the tooth ache. The ER is better run than the Gay, Inc. advocacy groups. At least in an ER, the triage staff ensures that the ER treats people in the order of severity of their medical needs instead of who is screaming the loudest, who is most sympathetic or whoever has the most family members advocating for them. Draw the similarities between this example and the DADT lobby.
The DADT lobby is the loudest, it has lots of friends and its very sympathetic. Its also less worthy of our attention and resources when compared to ENDA. Protecting our veterans is important – no one is arguing this point. But under the manner we are currently operating, we are guilty of using the same tactics we decried of the Bush administration: using fake, phony patriotism to push an agenda. It’s the same agenda that got Bush’s Patriot Act onto the books. It’s dangerous and its pursuit is ignorant. Moreover, its at the expense of millions of Americans for the benefit of an incredibly small group of people.
For starters, there are honestly not that many queers in the military. Sure, there are plenty, I am sure. Supposedly 10% of the population is gay, so that means that 10% of the military should be gay. Based on current numbers, there are about 2.6 million people in the military (including all services and the reserves) we are talking about 260,000 people at the most. Of course, you can slice and dice the numbers any way you want. Anyone who has been through a college level statistics course or a political campaign knows you can create a number to support any argument, no matter how ludicrous. No one has numbers on how many gays there are in the military right now because they aren’t allowed to declare their status, thats the whole point, remember? So all of these numbers on how many people are effected are just best guesses, not hard facts despite the fact that you’d never know as much by the way they are relied upon and cited.
Now, let us keep in mind that being in the military is a want, not a need. People may want to serve their country, but they wont die if they don’t. They will, however, die if they are unable to provide for themselves in the way of food and shelter. This is not just my opinion and common sense, I have scientific research to back this up. American Psychologist Abraham Maslow came up with “Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs” to explain a human’s needs and what order they come in and he expressed this in a pyramid. At the base are things most important, towards the top are things that are still important, but cannot exist without a foundation and therefore we consider them more important because other things depend on them. We find things like food, water, shelter, employment on the bottom two levels of the pyramid. While membership in the military is not specifically mention, a reasonable argument can be made that it would fall under “Love/Belonging” and “Esteem/Achievement” categories. Therefore, being in the military is less important than being able to obtain gainful employment and the things that come from it. This is high school stuff, kids — not rocket science.”
It is true that queers kicked out the military under DADT face a variety of challenges, including the inability to find work. You’d think this would cause folks to see the ability of queers to be employed to be a more significant issue. It impacts more people and one problem goes a ways towards solving the others. If we took care of the ENDA issue, at least queers kicked out of the military could return to the states and obtain gainful employment. But our current approach has us pursuing protections for a special interest group with limited success. Meanwhile, there is some queer somewhere sleeping under a bridge because no one will hire them.
To build a strong queer community, we need to strengthen our foundations. We need to focus on the basics before we take that larger leap forward. Under our current approach, we are trying to put queers on the moon when none of them can even pass the NASA entrance exams. Something is wrong with this, obviously.
Keith on Tap 